Then Gwen drove the sword down, throwing her entire body weight behind the thrust, a scream of effort bursting from her—and suddenly she was flying, breathless, suspended for two heartbeats in the air until she hit the wall with a horrible metallic clatter and dropped to the ground. She’d managed to keep hold of her sword, and she scrambled up, head spinning, to see the dragon shaking its own head where it had knocked her aside.

It was climbing stutteringly to its feet, though the confines of the tunnel prevented it from standing fully—Gwen would have thought it ridiculous or pathetic, a dragon crawling on its belly through a tunnel barely large enough to fit its body, if she’d heard it described to her. But as its head swung toward her and it lunged into effortless motion, flowing sinuously along the cavern far quicker than she could move, all hints of the ridiculous vanished.

Gwen threw herself to the side, down one of the excavated tunnels. Though she could see the light of her torch glinting off bronze around the corner back the way she came, it didn’t reach far enough to illuminate the darkness ahead of her.

From behind her came a sound that would almost certainly haunt her dreams for the rest of her life: an awful, keening, bubbling roar, like that of a beast with blood in its throat. She had only an instant to realize what the sound betokened, and saw a brief tableau blossoming into illumination before her—she threw herself down behind a cart loaded with stone as a gout of flame filled the tunnel.

She held her breath as long as she could, and when she finally gasped for air, it scorched her lungs, her eyes watering with smoke and the acrid stench of the thing. Her armor was warmer to the touch now than her skin, the air as dry and hot as that of an oven, hotter than the air above her father’s forge. She might have passed out if she hadn’t spent so many hours laboring in those conditions. Tears streamed from her eyes, and she blinked furiously, blinded by the sudden darkness as the flames died away. She focused on trying not to sob, on staying as quiet as she could.

The creature was still waking up. Gwen didn’t have much time before it was fully alert—and she had only one idea.

She waited, listening to the awful scrape of the scales lining its belly dragging along the stone, each one screeching like a blade on ceramic. The thing snuffled and grunted as it searched for her blindly in the dark, seeking the stench of burning flesh. Gwen closed her eyes, though it made no difference to what she could see. She listened, waiting.